Gee, do you think the original plan was to release this update on Halloween? Spoooooky!

Poof!

When “Erase, then copy” is selected, SuperDuper! has always endeavored to match the format of the source. That is, if the source is Mac OS Extended [HFS+] (Journaled), and the destination is Mac OS Extended (Case Sensitive), on an erase, the destination would end up matching the source, adding Journaling and removing Case Sensitivity.

As I mentioned in one of my first High Sierra posts, we always knew this wouldn’t work when going HFS+ to APFS: you just can’t format an APFS container as HFS+ safely, since it can affect more than just the one volume.

We’ve discovered during our broader Beta rollout that, due to weird bugs in Disk Utility, formatting an HFS+ drive as APFS is unreliable too. Sometimes the drive just “vanishes” and doesn’t re-mount. Sometimes it fails for no reason. Sometimes it makes the one volume unreadable until it’s erased again.

It’s kind of scarycrazy. But that seems to be par for the early version High Sierra course. It’s relatively solid in the main, but really weak at the margins.

...But I Don’t Do That

So, we’ve made a change in our “magic” behavior to deal with these issues. Basically, we continue to do what we’ve always done. But if the “major” part of the file system doesn’t match (that is, HFS+ and APFS), we just maintain the existing format of the drive.

So, if you copy APFS to an HFS+ volume with erase, we’ll erase the destination but leave it as HFS+.

Hopefully we’ll be able to change this as macOS stabilizes further.

Enter the Void

I regret to say that we’ve fixed the “black flash” bug, so you’ll no longer have a moment to stare into the blackness as it stares back at you.

Perhaps that’s for the best.

Spaced

We didn't notice (but should have) that our various numbers were now proportionally spaced rather than monospaced since we built against a newer SDK with different targeting when we made the UI 64-bit.

Of course, someone—and you know who you are—noticed right away. Embarrassing, and fixed.

It’s Log, It’s Log!

One of the things we’ve done is improve our diagnostic logging, so when people send in a bug report, we get a better feeling for the state of the drives attached to the system, and the problems that might be going on with the system, should there be any.

We changed this a bit to only collect the extended log information when copies fail.

In earlier OS versions we would include a bit of the system log, so we could see what hardware was doing at the time of the copy. That stopped working in recent macOS release, so we've changed it to use log show.

The problem is, log show -last 1m, including a kernel predicate so it only returns low-level kernel logging, can be slow. Not only that, but due to bugs in the logging subsystem, it can incorrectly return much more than one minute of logging. We've seen it return almost a gigabyte of log data!

Even though we also limit the data to a short snippet at the end of all that text, we have to wait for it to be collected, and when the system grabs too much, it can take a while to retrieve and then discard the extra stuff.

The end result of all this is that we only do it when copies fail, and we put up a modal sheet while it's going on.

And Also, Too

Previously, when users sent in a report, we only included the log information when they reported an "Error during copy". We were a bit too clever for our own good there, since people didn’t always choose the right issue type, and then we’d have to ask for the report to be sent in again. We now always attach the log when using “Send to Shirt Pocket”.

These are small things, I know, but they'll help me help you more quickly and efficiently, should you ever need support.

I Can't Quit You, Baby

There are still some issues with quit that we're aware of...we're working on them.

Various and Sundry

There has also been a bunch of polishing and fixing things at the margins, thanks to user reports from highly unusual configurations, but as before, things are working really well on the vast majority of systems, which we’re really happy about. It’s just kind of boring to write about how great things are working for most people!